US spy services ‘hacked into sim card maker’, based in Amsterdam

For the first time there is concrete evidence that the US security service NSA hacked a company in the Netherlands, the Volkskrant reports on Friday.

The information gleaned in the hack will allow the Americans to listen in to foreign telephone traffic without the knowledge of the country involved or the provider, the newspaper says.

The paper bases its claim on an article in online magazine The Intercept, which uses information from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The digital break-in was carried out on Gemalto, a company with offices in Amsterdam’s Zuidas district and which is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange.

Gemalto is the world’s biggest provider of chips for sim cards, bank cards and passports. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities.

Joint operation

Gemalto makes some two billion sim cards a year for companies such as Vodafone, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. By stealing the security codes, the spy service can detect and decode traffic from the telephones concerned.

The Intercept says the hack was carried out by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

Voice and data

The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gives the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data, the Intercept says.

In a statement Gemalto said ‘We cannot at this early stage verify the findings of the publication and had no prior knowledge that these agencies were conducting this operation.’

‘We take this publication very seriously and will devote all resources necessary to fully investigate and understand the scope of such sophisticated techniques.’